Built By Obama: What You See Is Not What You GetThe dark side of Obama's statement: collective achievement equals collective punishment

As Obama's "you didn't build that" quote is being probed and analyzed, I'd like to point out that the idea of redistributing other people's achievements is only a tip of an iceberg; its foundation sinks deep underneath the floating wreckage of American values.

Lest we take Obama's words out of context and are accused of "swift-quoting," let's review the full passage. Speaking at a campaign stop in Roanoke, Va., on July 13th, Barack Obama said:

"If you were successful, somebody along the line gave you some help. There was a great teacher somewhere in your life. Somebody helped to create this unbelievable American system that we have that allowed you to thrive. Somebody invested in roads and bridges. If you've got a business, you didn't build that. Somebody else made that happen. The Internet didn't get invented on its own. Government research created the Internet so that all the companies could make money off the Internet. The point is, when we succeed, we succeed because of our individual initiative, but also because we do things together."

A friend with a PhD in mathematics made this comment: "We scientists say that in order to make an apple pie from scratch, you must first build the universe - and that takes about four billion years. But that doesn't mean we can't build anything new from existing resources. So telling a businessman 'you didn't build that' is pure sophistry. Such phrases have always been a preamble to looting. Coming from the President, it's chilling."~Now let's put on our intellectual scuba gear to explore what lies beneath Obama's superficial altruistic bragging, which until now has served him as an unsinkable platform.

Apart from the simple untruth that "government created the Internet," Obama's words boil down to the old collectivist bromide that the individual is nothing without the society and the state. As one would expect, Obama didn't come up with it on his own. Standing on the shoulders of his collectivist predecessors, he ineptly restated Mussolini's motto: "All individuals or groups are relative, only to be conceived in their relation to the State." And Benito's fellow collectivist Adolf Hitler agrees: "Our nation can achieve permanent health only from within on the basis of the principle: The common interest before self-interest."

If the businessman "didn't build that," who did? Apparently, all of us did! And if the credit is equally shared, so must be the reward. Jackpot winners all! No more worries about paying the mortgage or filling the gas tank. This must be what thrilled Obama's voters during the 2008 election, as his speeches removed old moral barriers protecting other people's property and made it available to all, establishing a new morality of forced redistribution of wealth, previously known as looting.

But here's the catch: everything in this world has a price. If all of us can be credited for someone else's achievement, by the same logic, all of us can be punished for someone else's failure. Just as all individual credit goes to the society as a whole, so does all the blame. And if the entire group, class, nation, or race can gain moral authority because some of its members did something right, the same standard grants the moral authority to blame any other group, class, nation, or race because some of its members did something wrong. In the history of collectivism this concept translated into wars, slavery, pogroms, terrorism, ethnic cleansing, expropriation of wealth, deportation, internment, resettlement, and genocide.

It appears that the two notions, collective achievement and collective punishment, are as inseparable as two sides of the same coin.

But there's more: if nothing is to your credit, then nothing is your fault. What is the cost of that bargain? In a seemingly fair trade-off, we lose our right to individual achievements but gain the right to blame others for our failures. Collectivism provides us with a sufficiently analgesic illusion of fairness. If you turn out to be a loser, it's not because you are unqualified: on a whim, with objective standards removed, you can now self-righteously put the blame on those close to you, or on the unfair system, or even on the big wide (and deeply flawed) world.

Before you know it, your moral impulses are reduced to an immature tantrum of a toddler who breaks things and hits a babysitter; a teenager who curses at his family and blames the Universe for his pimples; a graduating student of Marxism at the Occupy Wall Street encampment who vandalizes private property and blames capitalism for not providing him with a high-income job; an aging member of the "drug revolution" who blames The Man and The System for his depression; or the President of the United States who blames corporations and bank CEOs, modern technology and "messy democracy," Fox News and all other media, the Japanese tsunami and the Arab Spring, as well as Bush, Reagan, Congress, the GOP, and the entire city of Washington for his lack of achievement.

Coincidentally, such is also the moral foundation of collectivist societies, from Cargo Cult followers to the so-called People's Democracies. In the erstwhile USSR, the government redistributed not only the nation's dwindling wealth; it redistributed successes and failures. All achievements were credited to the Party and its leaders, as well as to a centrally appointed regiment of "Heroes of Socialist Labor," who conspicuously "sacrificed for the common good." The failures were blamed on foreign aggressors, Western imperialism, enemies of the people, kulaks, saboteurs, corrupt bureaucracy, irresponsible middle management, selfish greed, and lack of proletariat consciousness, as well as on natural disasters and bad weather. Sound familiar?

Find the guilty and the opportunistic politicians will come. The problem is, they come not to help you but to help themselves. The latest example is the current grievance-mongering U.S. government - a massive self-serving army of patented demagogues who have yet to improve one life or right a single wrong. In the final analysis, collectivism is a dead end. Releasing the floodgates of government corruption is only Act One in the drama of a declining nation.

Now that we have gotten to the bottom of it, let's review Obama's quote from this new perspective:

"If you have failed, somebody along the line ruined it for you. There was a lousy teacher somewhere in your life. Somebody helped to create this unfair American system that caused you to fail. Somebody benefitted from your demise. If you're a loser, it's not your fault. Somebody else made that happen. Titanic didn't sink on its own. Corporations and insurance companies made a lot of money off of it, so they must be complicit. The point is, when we fail, we fail not only because of our individual shortcomings, but also because others have teamed up behind your backs. Vote for me - I'll punish the guilty and give you what's rightfully yours."

It turns out that, after all, "someone else made that happen" is merely a flipside of "blame someone else." One can't exist without the other.

In contrast, the argument for individualism and competitive private enterprise cannot be "flipped" - not without distorting its nature and moral purpose. The statement, "It's my achievement and I have the right to what I earn," manifests only positive, objectively true human values.

Unlike its alternatives, capitalism doesn't grow out of a dark, indiscernible mass of moral entanglements. And unlike crony capitalism - a corrupt monster created by government intrusion into the economy - free market capitalism is transparent. Just like the greatest invention of our time, the personal computer (brought to us by free enterprise), capitalism has a user-friendly interface: WHAT YOU SEE IS WHAT YOU GET.

CULTURALLY, Obama is a SOB. Given a chance, he would never collectivize. He wants the merit for success to go to “somebody else”, read “the Glorious Leader, Obama”, and the blame for the failure to remain individual. If a company fails, Obama has hands clean. He would tax them some more though.

Obama, Marx, Marxists, Democrats, Muhammad, Muslims. Such a diverse crowd. What puts them together? The fact that they are looters. This great republic has been founded by farmers, as opposed to looters. That’s why looters hate it so viscerally.

How can I tell that Obama and Dems are looters? By the tax rate. As you increase the tax rate, you increase the revenue, up to a point. Then, as you increase the tax rate, you DECREASE the revenue. USA is long past that point. It means that they are not only interested in looting, but also in keeping the looted down. The lopsided tax code deforms the market, and is a further indication of Dems being looters. The constitution of the USA is so short that I keep it in my pocket all the time. The constitution of EU and the Obamacare law are so long that nobody ever has read them. The point: make it complex, Chicago-style, so that it means whatever you want, whenever you want it to mean.

Marx: “The communism is the riddle of history solved, and it knows to be the solution.” Now that’s pretty darn much a big thing: turning History from storytelling (bard’s domain) into exact science. Einstein and a hundred biggest minds of mankind together can’t aspire to this much. It just happened by chance that Marxism improved the lot of Marx. Marx would have spelled out those scientific truths even if they hurt his lot. What does Marx call the adversaries and those who don’t line up to his scientific truths? What not. Lumpenproletariat, for one. By chance, “kulak” means “wealthy farmer.” Yes, the worst enemy of the looter is the looted, the wealthy farmer. By chance.

In Arabic “farmer”, “poor”, “infidel” have the same etymological root. Looters anybody? Also “black” and “slave” are exactly the same word: “abd”. Somebody tell Farrakhan, Ellison, Black Pampers that they have been had, again. It so happens that slavery today exists massively in the fault-line between Arab-Muslim world and Black Africa.

After many failures, Marxism is evolving, with Antonio Gramsci, Marcuse and others. Original diehard Marxists would call these guys revisionists and hang them from the nearest pole. Anyway, this evolution is also sign of corruption and impending collapse.

What happens if/when looters win? We know this, and have ample examples from history. When looters think that there is already enough for them, they do what a pack of hyenas do after they’ve killed a bull. They lacerate each other. Ecologists anybody? Overpopulation, Malthus, Al Gore anybody?

Wherever there is wealth, there will be looters. The solution to this? Farmers must be more aggressive. Hence the geniality of the Second Amendment. Hence the obsession of the looters with the Second Amendment. They know what stands on their way. Anyway, we must be some more aggressive. As testified by the level of loot, our level of aggression is not yet enough to fend them off, demoralize them, disgregate them.

I am happy that Comrade Red Square is second-best to Andrew Klavan for the interest generated (measured by the number of comments), by a small margin.

Looking forward to meet Comrade Red Square someday. Today is a happy day for me, as I had the last exam of the semester. Anxious to see my final grades that I didn't earn. Somebody else paid fees, skipped Facebook, took loan, took 15 credits per semester while keeping a full-time job and a 3.7 GPA. Somebody else is doing it for me, but I haven't yet figured out who that somebody else is.

I suffer from Facebook withdrawal symptoms, that's why I come here and waste my time talking about Comrade Obama and Our Lord, The Infallible, Marx.

I got it. That somebody else is Artan Sinollari, my Albanian professor of Marxism in high school. He has given me the everlasting thrust, sufficient to make me go to Mars, preferring a barren rock to people like him. I will figure this out. Gotta go to Mars.

I repeat that in high school I wasn't really a revolutionary, dissident or whatsoever else. I minded my own business and studied the Marxism class very well. This guy had the dastardly habit of asking me questions. I answered by the book. He used to say once no, then bla bla bla bla bla bla elaborated on his no. By the end of the class I had answered all the questions by the book and got a no every time. I got a 7 in Marxism, that by law barred me from continuing my studies in Mathematics, as I was not enough ideologically lucid as to continue Math.

Another trick that he employed was to leave me alone for extended periods, in order to catch me unprepared. That never worked.

I never figured out why did he hit on me, a humble one minding my own business. It's been 22 years that I don't care to know, but back then it was a life-or-death burden.

For pig imperialist Americans (thick heads) to understand, it is a capital offense to make up stuff in Marxism. You are ABSOLUTELY not allowed to answer wrong. Not in Albania. It is OK to make up stuff in Mathematics, that can make the professor laugh. Behold getting the Marxism wrong!

Another very important point, comrades. A cute comradette from Tampa, FL with a PhD in, you guessed it, Anthropology, started attacking me "What do you know about Marx? What do you know about Marcuse? What do you know about Gramsci? What do you know about Social Engineering?"

They have gone very far, far away in painting the railway station in their garage, to the point that they believe it true. It is indeed very elaborate. The answer to this is not to study 100,000 pages of their crap in order to feel qualified to debate them and win with them in a "rational level" of their agreement, that you never can. Already reading until earning their respect as a qualifier debater will screw your life beyond repair.

The answer to this is to erode their ground with what you know, and most likely you know more about real things than them. As the great Reagan said it best, "Our liberal friends are not ignorant. They know too many things wrong." Tell them that because their theory fails every day, it must be wrong. Bring them examples. Yes, I know that they will blame what not. Ask them for one example when their ideas worked. They will say "we haven't yet got it right."

And another approach is to let go the most cretin of them, and spend your energies the most efficiently possible with people for whom there is hope.

I must denounce dEar Leader! Yes, is most dangerous to do so, but Comrade Obama has developed his own Cult of Personality. When glorious Soviet Union allowed Comrade Uncle Jo his own Cult of Personality, it resulted in the deaths of many millions by starvation. Worker's paradise of North Korea is continuing Cult of Personality of Kim family, and peasants are so hungry they eat grass and tree bark. Comrade Mao's Great Leap Forward (where have I recently heard that phrase?) and his Cultural Revolution killed off those who, while they might not have built the stuff they built, certainly provided People's Republic with technical expertise and capital generation that even marxist-leninist-stalinist-maoist benevolent governments must have in order to feed the peasants.

So, I must denounce Comrade Ogabe and work for his defeat in silly election in November, so glorious World of Next Tuesday can eventully arrive, even if we have to take two steps back to take one step forward.

Good article, Red. My blood ran cold like ice water when I read the reverse side of collective achievement is collective punishment. I shudder to think of the potential for a mob of his die-hard supporters run a muck.

Wait... what? Must have had another one of those black outs again. Damn it's hot in the beet field this year.

You can posses and enjoy your life on your own terms when you live in a society governed by the principles of individual rights. Its an old trick of the Left to say that the material bounty produced by free men is proof that society is a collectivist organism and we own everything to the collective.

It's of immense value to live in a society of free men. It is of no value, in fact suicidal, to live in a society where men proclaim themselves to be the voice of the collective and wish to rule free men, such as the case with Obama.

In end, Marxism is just elaborate version of favortism. In Catholic school, (unlike katholic school today), Accomplishment was lauded individually when person was liked by authority; jocks and suck asses. Punishment was meted out to all when offense was committed by persons not on the team who refused to knuckle under and cop the attitude desired by authority figures. Let us end this charade. Despots are as despots do. Pedigree of philosophy they claim to believe is facade.

If all of us can be credited for someone else's achievement, by the same logic, all of us can be punished for someone else's failure. Of course, Red, of course. For the RethugliKKKans, freedom is freedom of action. That is of course unconscionable; everyone must be responsible to us.

For us, freedom is the freedom from responsibility for our actions.

You'll note that this is precisely the same definition of freedom in Sharia and also, I'm afraid, in some other organizations like Opus Dei.

That's what I like. After all, I impale proles all that I want and with no consequences. Bring on that freedom from responsibility.

Wait! That means I can kill Bruno!

Funerary notices will be coming to all of us Made Progs. No memorials, please; merely send the money to

Oh, Castrate, I hereby wave My Red Wand of Socialist Power and create you a Made Prog. You are hereby immaculated into a Made Prog. For your services to all that is low, mean, vicious, nasty, thieving and vicious--did I say that?--you are anointed a Made Prog.

With of course recycled rendered prole suet. Well, you don't think that you're going to be anointed with exotic unguents from the Orient, do you? I promise you. For your valorous service to the Cause™, to fleeting toward the Progressive World of Next Tuesday™ (after you buy me a hamburger which I will NOT pay for next Tuesday, I Wimpily say) I'll make sure that I anoint you with rendered prole suet which hasn't been used to fry potatoes more than a hundred times.

I'll even strain it.

And give you the carbon black that I got from it. Now that's a sign of my respect for you.

In fact I don't think I've done as much even for Pinkie. She thought to make me do it, but unbeknownst to her, I'd lined the inside of my superheterodyne, phased-antenna-array tin-foil hat with Lexan and so her shovel just bounced off.

I laughed so hard that the radioactive pill Dr. Mengele had put into my head during my last Jiffy-Lobo™ fell out of the trepanation hole.

Oh. Did you know that you can have a Foley put into your head? Just drop in an M80 any time that you are feeling that perhaps Lord O is a commie idiot. Boom! Hope and change.

You can be your own Diana Moon Glampers.

And that's what we all want, isn't it? Well, some of us are more Glampers than others. Ask Janet Reno.

Oh, I just got a message on my bridgework from David Koresh. Later, Made Prog.

Oh, Castrate, I hereby wave My Red Wand of Socialist Power and create you a Made Prog. You are hereby immaculated into a Made Prog. For your services to all that is low, mean, vicious, nasty, thieving and vicious--did I say that?--you are anointed a Made Prog.

I'm so proud of you.

Most equal of you Father Prog and many thanks. For a minute I thought that I would have to do something like Lean Forward™ for the entire collective or something like that.

Well the reason I asked was that now since the Fuhrer wanna-be has selected his henchman Paul Ryan as his VP, and will be melting down grandma's wheelchair (after the cliff dive) to use for bullets to kill innocent Palestinians, and will deprive babies of their breast milk and re-allocate that to the neo-KKKonservative troops, I figured it was time I stepped up my political activities a bit.

I'm proud of BOTH of you! Father Prog, your delightfully candid insensitivity, as always, brings a chuckle of collective joy to all who behold it, and your generosity in Made-Progifying dear Comrade Castrate is so typical of your giving nature! I have no doubt whatsoever that his low, mean, vicious, nasty, thieving, and vicious nature will be significantly enhanced now that he's a Made Prog - and, with someone like yourself to emulate, there will be no stopping him in his vile (for the people) endeavors!

Comrade Castrate - my most equal congratulations and - if I may be so bold - have an extra shot of beet vodka tonight in celebration!

Castrate, I take your point. Now is the time for all good comrades to come to the aid of repression. Which is the prog version of the old WWII typing exercise, Now is the time for all good men to come to the aid of their party.

You have forgotten clubbing baby seals, setting fire to nursing homes, and changing the orbit of the earth so that we all fall off it.

Please note this most equal Representative, Hank Johnson, is worries that if too many people get on the island of Guam that it will tip over. Ah, the intellectual equal of Sheila Jackson Lee or our hero, Nanski Peloski.

Ah, ROCK so you so well understand the problems of an old prog like me. At first I didn't like being so insensitive but then I realized that a surgeon must cut people open to save lives.

Now I have no problem agreeing with say Ed Schultz who wants to take out Dick Cheney's heart and kick it around like a football. Or Nina Totenberg wishing AIDS on Jesse Helms and his grandchildren. The grandchildren. That's a good touch, like the Old Testament's visiting things on the children and grandchildren.

Oh. Like our national debt. See how it goes? It's righteous for us to spend as much of our children's future as possible, to endanger our parents' lives, and make sure that we have little chance, as long as we Made Progs have our snout and trotters in the public trough.

Poverty? What poverty? I'm a Made Prog. That's better than, oh, having talent.

Ed Schultz is I find a failed Canadian football player, and they mean football in the American sense. Boo, hiss. I prefer soccer because it's the pussy game the world plays. Then you get to get drunk and tear up the city. Hockey is good for that too. American football just doesn't engender enough riots.

A crisis is a terrible thing to waste.

However, there are moments of amusement in soccer. When the Brits were playing Les Froggies in Paris, the Brit louts were singing, to the tun of "She'll be comin' round the mountain when she comes."

If it wasn't for the English you'd be Krauts.If it wasn't for the English you'd be Krauts.If it wasn't for the English you'd be Krauts.and so on.

I'd have to add in the AmeriKKKans to the list of shame for people who denied our soul-brother Hitler his victory. Well, totalitarianism is totalitarianism, whether it's Naziism, communism, theocracy, or progressivism.

Today, President Obama sent out a campaign email essentially blaming his supporters if he loses. See, he’s supposedly being outspent. And because he’s supposedly being outspent, he’s losing. And he can’t spend more money unless his supporters fork it over.

This is the campaign version of Obama’s entire economic argument: he can’t fix the economy unless he spends more money. And unless we give him more money, he can’t spend it. So if the economy fails, it’s our fault.

Here’s the perverse logic:

Last week, when I was in Iowa, voters told me they were feeling it. The numbers back it up: Our side is getting outspent 2-to-1 on the air there.

But the folks asking me about this don't want an explanation -- they want to know what I'm going to do about it.

And the fact is that solving this problem is up to you ….

We're losing this air war right now.

I don't have as much time to campaign this time as I did in 2008, so this whole thing is riding on you making it happen.

Perhaps the most laughable aspect of this latest desperate missive is Obama’s assertion that he doesn’t have “as much time to campaign this time as I did in 2008.” He’s done nothing but campaign since the beginning of the year. From January to mid-June, Obama held more than 160 fundraisers. During that same period in 2004, President George W. Bush had held just 79 fundraisers.

Here’s the sad fact for Obama: nobody’s enamored with him anymore. His spendthrift ways haven’t just bankrupted the country – they’ve bankrupted his campaign. And he still blames everyone else.

By definition if Obama loses it's someone else's fault. Since he's never accomplished anything, he cannot be expected to fail. He's failed up in every position, since he's the repository of hope. Ah Hope. Hope-n-change. The Man from Hope. It's all about hope, isn't it?

And we must hope that the pig-ignorant electorate remains as pig-ignorant as they were in 2008. After all, it's not for lack of trying by the lapdog media and the teachers' unions.

... So what he's saying to his supporters is, "You didn't make me President?".... I thought that in spite of everything, the USSR was still a demokracy... If the voters didn't make him President, who did?

I understand that by asking these difficult questions, I could be sent to the Gulag, but it just seems really important to understanding the situation... or not, if there's going to be torture involved...

Trust me, comrades, I have it from a very reliable source, whom I can't name, that Obama's statement "You didn't build that!" was nothing more than a prelude, a trial balloon for what he'll say to gin up votes at the Democrat Party Convention in Charlotte, NC next week. Comrades, this statement from Dear Leader is our Holy Grail, what we've ALL patiently been waiting for him to say for four long years:

Jellohead, you're so right. Just think of the crowd roaring, "You don't own that! You don't own that! You don't own that!"

There need to be desensitization lessons for property owners who are too attached to their property. The property they saved up for, paid off, or bought. Their property. Because they don't really own it it will be hard for them to relinquish control.

[ off ]In my business, the land-title business, there are new regulations mooted about title policies which are so onerous and such a horrible example of crony capitalism that I'm going to stop doing them and screw the people who need houses or property conveyances. I'd have to convert from Macs to Winshit machines; I couldn't use the software I wrote, which has been giving us perfect audits; I'd have to pay an outside company to make sure that what hasn't happened for 41 years wouldn't happen in the next week. Fortunately there is more than enough income without this tribulation. So. Government destroys more.

I'm 57. I have been prudent. I will no longer be a whipping boy for these people.

The uncontested absurdities of today are the accepted slogans of tomorrow. They come to be accepted by degrees, by precedent, by implication, by erosion, by default, by dint of constant pressure on one side and constant retreat on the other - until the day when they are suddenly declared to be the country's official ideology. ~ Ayn Rand